Diagnosing 4 Disagreement Styles

We published one of our most popular blogs almost one year ago: How to Teach a Know-It-All. In it, we provided tools for overcoming business partners’ unshakeable confidence in what they think they know, even when that information is wrong.

So, Judith Glaser’s blog on HBR about the need to be right intrigued me. Here’s the basis for why it’s so hard to break a business partner’s gut intuition: threatening someone’s intellectual prowess causes a similar chemical reaction in the brain as threatening them physically, and leads them to react in one of four ways: